The New Accountability and Teachers’ Work in Urban High Schools in the USA

The late 1990s marked a major recentralization of authority in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). This recentralization occurred during a period of fiscal crisis and growing dissatisfaction with the district among both city business leaders and a state legislature increasingly controlled by suburban constituencies. In 1995, the CPS school board faced a $150 million deficit that threatened the district’s solvency. Frustrated by this latest round of fiscal problems and the slow pace of improvements in student learning as measured by standardized test scores, Chicago’s business leaders began to express their frustration with the decentralization efforts the district had undertaken in the late 1980s. Support for the district was also diminishing among a state legislature increasingly controlled by suburban legislators. In the 1990s, three of the four legislative leaders in the Illinois house and senate represented suburban constituencies that were 86% to 94% White and less than 3% low income (Wong et al, 1998). These legislative leaders had little incentive to respond to the needs of Chicago’s mostly poor and racial minority students. Indeed, the state legislature responded to the district’s deficit by threatening to decrease state aid until the district improved both its fiscal management and its students’ performance. Significantly, state aid to schools had been in decline in Illinois during this period, exacerbating the funding gap between wealthy, primarily White suburban districts and the majority low-income and racially diverse CPS. In the 1990s, the state provided for only 32% of the total revenues for elementary and secondary education, placing Illinois 44th out of all 50th states in the USA in terms of state per pupil spending (Wong et al, 1998). Further, the funding gap between districts in Illinois with the lowest percentage of low-income students and those with the highest continued to be among the largest in the country into the early 2000s (Carey, 2004).